The Navy is preparing to remove the name of gay rights icon Harvey Milk from one of its ships.

First reported by Military.com, Navy Secretary John Phelan is putting together plans to rename the replenishment oiler, USNS Harvey Milk. The renaming was ordered by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and intentionally planned as an affront to Pride Month, a DoD official confirmed. 

Stuart Milk, Harvey Milk’s nephew and executive director of the Harvey Milk Foundation, said the family is “heartbroken” by the news. 

“Harvey Milk’s legacy is certainly enhanced and celebrated by a US Naval Ship, however his legacy will not be silenced or diminished by the renaming of that Naval Ship,” Stuart said. 

Harvey Milk was a lieutenant diving officer deployed during the Korean War. He received a less than honorable discharge in 1955 after being questioned about his sexual orientation. At that time, out gay and bisexual men were banned from military service. 

Milk went on to lead a powerful gay rights movement in San Francisco, winning election as a city supervisor to become the first out gay man elected to public office in California. Tragically, in 1978, he was assassinated at city hall by another supervisor, dying at the age of 48. 

In his statement about the Naval Ship, Stuart Milk recounted his uncle’s famous words, “Let the bullets that enter my brain, destroy every closet door.”

The oiler, named after Milk in 2016, launched from San Diego on Nov. 6, 2021. It is part of the John Lewis class — a group of ships named after civil rights leaders and activists — and is being refitted at an Alabama shipyard. 

In a memo leaked to the press, the ship’s renaming is intended to bring the vessel and its crew into alignment with Hegseth’s “warrior ethos.”

U.S. Congresswomen Nancy Pelosi called the renaming “a shameful, vindictive erasure of those who fought to break down barriers for all to chase the American Dream."